Yet another Open Source Days blog post

Everyone in Denmark is blogging about Open Source Days, and now I am too. Open Source Days is an annual two day conference in Copenhagen – formerly known as Linuxforum – which was held this weekend. It covers both business aspects as well as technical and community aspects of free/open source software.

First of all I’d like to congratulate the organizers and volunteers on an extremely well carried out conference. Everything was smooth, schedules were kept, no technical issues, etc., if there were ever any problems at all the organizers managed to keep them well hidden behind the scenes. However I did notice that some of the bags that were handed out had more than one copy of the same promotional material, so at least there is one little thing to improve upon 😉

I saw a few interesting talks, but not as many as I would have liked, mainly due to duties in the SSLUG booth. I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the ones that I missed, when they become available.

SSLUG booth
In the SSLUG booth we had fun as always, among other things showing off the Fit-PC Slim, which we had borrowed from Peter Toft.

That’s my “new” FSC Lifebook E8110 on the corner of the table btw.

The SUSE perspective
Of course, some of us tend to see things in a distinct green tint…

The total absence of Novell.dk was striking. Last year they were sponsors, had a booth, the Novell user group was there. This year? No trace of them anywhere. But of course there was a strong SUSE presence nevertheless.

Most interestingly I discovered that Linuxshoppen.dk are taking orders for the MSI Wind (on the left) and the HP Mini-Note (on the right), due to become available within a few weeks with Danish keyboard and everything – both of them preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 with the GNOME desktop environment. Linuxshoppen had a couple of these on display at their booth.

Adam Jollans of IBM gave a presentation, using the IBM Open Client which he said is used every day by ~30.000 IBM employees. He said it was based on Red Hat – but I’m pretty sure it’s actually based on SLED. If I’m mistaken, at the very least it does have the (in)famous Slab menu on it.

Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera gave their keynote presentation about GNU/Linux in Hollywood on openSUSE 11.0/KDE4.0. Nothing crashed, in case you’re wondering.